EPISODE 5 - PART 1

- FOR THE FUTURE -

[WHITE]

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“Vincent?!” A woman shouts far away.

“Vincent, where are you?!”

Another two people start calling his name, their voices echo throughout the narrow streets. The great wall of the fortress shadows the sunset’s light from the small buildings nearby.

“Dad…” A young boy mumbles, seated on the roof’s tiles of a house, hugging tighter his legs in fear. “You are still protecting me, right?”

(“Of course, son, you don’t need to worry about it!” Dad grins, raising his fist in glory.)

“But why they don’t destroy the walls?” The boy asks afraid, a year or two younger than now, being a seven-year-old.

“What?” He stops grinning. “I told you! I’m the one protecting it!”

“But you are tiny, how come the monsters don’t chew you up?”

“That hurts, son,” Dad cleans a drop of tear. “I thought you looked at me as your hero…”

“Don’t be like that!” The boy says concernedly, moving his hands for Dad to stop crying. “I’m just worried that you might do something stupid.”

Dad stops cleaning his tears, opening a harmful grin.

(“Now I don’t know if I’m sad or happy.”)

“I told you…” The boy on the roof mumbles in anger.

“Vincent?” The woman shouts under him.

“Where that kid ran to?” An old man asks.

The boy looks down at the two of them, the woman has a long dark dress of a maid with the old man at her side, they guide themselves on the night with lamps and the street poles’ lights.

“I don’t know what to do anymore,” she sighs. “He’s such a troublesome.”

“Must be hard to him…” The old man lowers his head. “Being in the orphanage so suddenly in life.”

“But right when someone wanted to adopt him… his life would change for the better.”

The boy lies down on the roof, the tilling is hard and uncomfortable but tiredness makes it bearable, his eyes close slowly as his body contracts by the cold wind.

“Sometimes,” the old man talks from below, “you don’t want to change.”

The world fades out to black as if everything was falling into the abyss, as growls and flapping wings of animals come from deep within, muffled by the thick walls.

From the distance, naked steps walk on the stone floor until it stops in front of the door and opens it, the moonlight shapes the figure of a six-year-old boy standing on the corridor, crying and cleaning tears with his hands.

“Dad…”

He gets up from the bed’s pillow with sleepy eyes, “Were the monsters again?”

The boy nods positively.

“Don’t worry,” He says calmly, “Come over here, you can sleep with me.”

The boy goes a step forward but then stops. “Why can’t we go away from the big wall?” His voice trembles.

“You know we don’t have the money for that…”

“And that’s why we need to be next to them?” He raises his voice in anger.

“I’m sorry, son, but that’s how it is.” He lifts the blanket with a gentle smile. “Let me protect you, come on.”

The boy hesitates, but then he extends his right hand to the bed’s warmth, but his body slides at it and so he wakes up in a scare.

The daylight burns his eyes, but he forces them open, bulging in fear, his right hand is hanging to the street’s ground, which appears to be at a couple of floors down, realizing he’s on the house roof’s corner.

He tries to move back, but his body is numb and heavy, and so he continues to slowly slide down, where people are walking and the wheels of a wooden cart get closer. His feet drag on the tiles quicker and quicker until the noise of friction ends on a higher note, after a half-second of silence a thud can be heard and everyone on the street stops.

“What the hell?!” A man shouts with a hoarse voice.

The boy opens his eyes, seeing the blue sky and realizing that he’s lying on a bunch of potatoes’ sacs.

“Get out of my cart, damn thief!” The man draws his sword.

His back hurts as he tries to sit up, he looks back to where he had fallen to, but before he could process anything a sword jams on the cart near his legs.

“Get away from my merchandise!” The merchant says as he almost falls back after getting the sword out of the wood.

The boy tries to get up in a scare, but his feet can’t find the right balance and so he falls, hitting his back in the other cart’s corner, which ends up detaching itself from the frame and bending the wheel, making a sea of potatoes to follow him to the ground. The man goes around to see the damage.

“Damn rat!” He raises his sword. “You’ll die for this!”

The boy twists his body, evading a sword blow that was aimed at his head, seeing sparks on the stone pavement.

“Hold on! I- I’m not a thief!”

“Right, I’m tired of you rats stealing my stuff,” he raises the sword above his head. “Someone needs to teach you a lesson!”

The boy crawls to his back in fear, climbing on the sacs as another swing hits the potatoes in the middle of his legs.

“I- I… ” The boy’s voice trembles, looking up to what appears to be one of the monsters he’s so afraid of, it takes the sword’s tip off the ground with blazing anger on his eyes, raising it again above his head and snorting like a bull, in a single exhale he descends the sword to the boy’s head, which only moves his arm to protect his closed eyes.

A loud noise of steel reverberates in front of him, as he reopens his eyes he notices that the man’s sword is jammed on a metal stick, inside what appears to be a flattened hexagon hole in its pipe.

“What do you plan to do with this, a potato skewer?” A mature and tired voice refers to the man’s sword, which has some potatoes stuck on its blade.

“Bastard, let go of it!” The merchant tries to pull his sword, but with no success, as the metal friction’s noise follows.

“What’s the purpose of having a sword if it’s to attack little kids?” He pushes the sword away, releasing it.

“The fortress would be better without those pests!” The merchant straights his sword to the man in front. “Life is hard enough without the trouble they make.”

The boy looks up, to a man using a black overcoat with three pairs of buttons on its middle and a pocket on each side, wearing white leather gloves and a black homburg, which is similar to a fedora. His black hair comes off the sides of his hat, staring intensely with his dark-blue eyes at the merchant.

“Are you planning on fighting me?” He points the stick forward with only one hand, in a serious tone. “For what I saw, your sword skills aren’t the best.”

The merchant grunts in anger and looks around, everyone stopped to see what was happening, their hands hiding their mouths as they gossip with each other in fright.

“This isn’t about skill, that kid tried to steal from me, I want to see what the guards have to say about this!” He shouts, wanting for the people to listen and lowering his sword.

A gloved hand reaches out to help, “Can you get up, boy?”

The boy looks to his white glove and cold but gentle eyes, he starts going for it, but then he slaps with the back of his hand to push it away. “I can get up on my own.”

“Stay right there, you thief!” The merchant yells, “You’re going to respond for what you did! Look at my cart! My potatoes are all on the ground! Do you know how much I lost with this?”

“But I didn’t want to steal from you, you crazy geezer.”

“You rat!” The merchant lifts his sword.

“I just-”

The man in the black overcoat signals for the boy to stop, as he straightens his homburg. “What about if I paid for the damages?” He proposes diplomatically,

“That won’t do! I already said it-”

“Did you said you lost a lot, right? By that you meant money? Because I doubt the military is going to pay you for this, and not to mention that he’s just a boy, I doubt you would get much out of him.”

“They need to learn a lesson! A-And this cart is made of wood, do you know how rare one of those is? It’s my family’s heritage, past from father to son!”

“I see, and I’m sorry about this important loss,” He says methodically. “But it’s really worth the time? Reporting to the guards, then waiting for a trial to testify, for something that might end up in nothing? Say, what about two thousand to cover everything?”

“Wha… ?” The merchant recomposes himself looking at the scattered potatoes, “N-No, I prefer to-”

“Three thousand, then.”

The merchant gulps, “Alright… I- I did overreact, but how are you going to pay me?”

He takes out a block of paper from his black overcoat and a stylish dark-purple pen with golden lines in it.

“What the hell? Are you an elite?” The merchant says in awe.

“Three thousand… here you go” He rips off the paper he just signed, giving it to the merchant.

“This’ the real deal… ?” He places the fancy check’s emblem against the sunlight. “Thank you!” He starts to laugh.

“Now, boy… why are you here? Shouldn’t you be in the orphanage?” He bends slightly to talk closer.

“That isn’t your problem.” He answers with his arms crossed and a closed face.

(“That’s the one.” The man in black overcoat whispers, looking at the same boy in the orphanage. ‘His eyes, are of a smart hunter.’)

(“All the papers are ready, Mr. De Vaught.” The same maid from before says with a grin.)

(“Perfect.” He says, turning to the boy, that’s seated with his head down next to him. “Now, child, you are going to be called Vincent De Vaught.”)

(“I don’t wanna…” The boy mumbles.)

(“What, Vincent?” The maid asks gently.)

(He looks up, with anger on his face. “My name is Vincent Gill! I’m not going to let my father’s name to be changed!”)

(Vincent runs out of the room, the maid shouts for him to not be like that, and Mr. De Vaught’s eyes darkens, still fixated on where the boy was seated, the small hope he had, vanished with that response.)

“I’m really sorry, Vicent Gill.” Mr. De Vaught's words make Vincent look at him. “I’ll never take your family’s name, I should be the one knowing it the best.”

He straightens his hat with a sigh.

“You see, I’m the last one of my family’s name, and so I was desperate enough to try taking someone else’s past, and you made me realize how selfish it was.”

Vincent hesitates, “Don’t you have anyone?”

“Once… I was expecting a child,” He glazes his dark eyes at Vincent. “But he and my wife died in labor.”

“S-Sorry about that…”

“You shouldn’t,” He starts walking slowly with the support of the stick, his pacing is crooked, having difficulty to move with his right leg. And so, Vincent starts to follow him. “Someone already told you that you’re stronger than you look?”

Vincent frowns. “No, not really.”

“Just looking at your eyes, I can feel it. It’s like my German ancestors had been reborn on you.”

“German? What’s a ‘german’?”

“They are people, but from somewhere else, once we had a fortress just for our own, but it got destroyed long ago.”

“Did the monsters destroyed it?” Vincent blushes by asking in the impulse.

He looks at Vincent with one eye.

“Yes, the monsters did it, and then we had to escape from the forest’s creatures until we got here on Windcut.” He continues looking forward. “Besides the De Vaught family, I believe there are three others left, we are the last ones, the last Germans.”

They walked in silence for some minutes until they arrived at the orphanage’s entrance, where the woman in maid uniform was getting out, opening a short fence.

“Vincent!” She opens a grin and runs to hug him. “Where were you? I was so worried!”

Her hug is warm, Vincent spent so much time in the cold night that he forgot how someone else’s harm felt like.

(“Let me protect you,” His Dad says within deep memories.)

“Mr. De Vaught,” She releases Vincent, ”so you were the one that found him?”

“Indeed.” He cleans his throat with a muffled grunt, ”If it’s still possible, I want to finish the process of adoption.”

“What?” Vincent exclaims.

The maid smiles, “Sure.”

“Why don’t we restart? My name is Andriel De Vaught, and who are you?”

Vincent looks at him, then he looks at the maid, which gives a reinforcing nod with a smile for him to continue.

“I- I’m Vincent, Vincent Gill.”

“Nice to meet you, Vincent Gill, even so you’re going to be part of my family from now on, you can keep your name, actually, I want you to. I just want you to answer me one more thing: What do you want to do?”

“Whah? What that mean?”

“Is there something you want to become, do or make? It could be anything, and I’ll help you with your journey and make your name to be remembered.”

“Ahm…” Vincent thinks uncomfortably, “I don’t-”

(The monsters’ growls of his dreams emanate from deep outside of the great wall.)

“I want- I want to become stronger, so I can fight the monsters off! So I can protect everyone. And not let this fortress be destroyed as yours did.”

Andriel smiles. “Perfect, so I’ll teach you how to fight.”

- BONUS PAGE -

“That’s your house???” Vincent opens his mouth in surprise.

“It is.” He takes an old key out of his pockets.

They are in front of a house that is smashed in by the other two that looks the same, with the only difference that his’ the worse one of the bunch.

“It’s literally on the big wall!”

“And what’s the problem?” Andriel says seriously, trying to trust the key on the keyhole, but it’s all stuck in rust.

Vincent’s face is of complete disappointment. “I thought I was finally going to live away from the monsters…”

Andriel twists the key, making strange metallic sounds on the door’s lock. “Why are you afraid?”

“Because… when they come, here’s going to-”

Andriel pulls the door with his entire body, making a loud noise of metal. “Weren’t you the one that would protect it?”

“Yeah, but…” Vincent mumbles, but then he remembers one thing. “Hold on a second, what about those three thousand you gave that merchant guy?”

“Huh?” He recalls it. “Even if you don’t have money, it doesn’t mean you can be impolite.” He tips his homburg.

“I’m pretty sure giving money is one exception to that.”